Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(23)

In theory. In practice, flight involved more collaboration with the Goddess than anyone on the force had managed so far. “We’re not trained for aerial combat. Most officers don’t even know how to make the Suit grow wings.”

“No time to try like the present,” he said.

“I have a better idea.”

She did not exactly pray. She wasn’t talking to a god—or goddess, for that matter. Just sending a message.

Keep telling yourself that.

Her own thought. Probably. Either way, she ignored it.

Waves lapped the Bounty’s sides, and the deck rolled gently beneath them. In the distance, wind whistled over sharp rocks.

“I’m waiting,” Raz said.

He looked up as the whistle approached.

Aev fell from heaven in a granite blur and flared her wings to arrest herself one foot above the deck. She landed with a soft tick of talons on wood, but her weight still set the ship rocking.

“Can I help?” she asked.

Raz swore in a language Cat did not recognize, and removed his cap. “I think you can, at that.”





13

Matt half-hoped their plan, concocted over drinks at lunch—their scheme, to be honest—would end as so many others did, in a third (or fourth) round of beers and someone’s finally remembering they all had shops to open come morning. Public displays of civic fervor were no fit pastimes for small business owners. Leave adventures to kids dumb as they’d once been, a new crop of which the Quarter sprouted every year and ate faster.

But Corbin Rafferty did not calm. The idea stuck in his mind like a fishhook in the lip, and he would not stop wriggling long enough to let others pry it out. He took to the street, and Matt followed.

Determination straightened Corbin’s weaving path. He visited taprooms and tea shops whose owners he knew, and regaled them with his plan. He met customers on sidewalks and outside construction sites and playing ball on public courts, and in each venue he proclaimed: I’ll bring the Stone Men for you all to see. Come to the market tonight at nine. The message took them as far as Hot Town before Matt noticed the Crier following them, a bow-shouldered man in guild orange. He dropped into a convenience store, waited for the Crier to pass, then stepped out behind him.

“You want something.”

The Crier spun and stumbled and caught himself on cracked pavement. He had to look a long way up to meet Matt’s eyes. “Just a story.”

“You have the story already.”

“One witness is nice; twenty would be better. If your friend—or his daughter—calls the Stone Men, and they come, that’s news.”

“Maybe they won’t show.”

“That’s news, too.”

“Come tonight, then,” he said. “Stop following us.”

Matt didn’t wait for the Crier’s answer—walked past him, instead, to join Rafferty, who was haranguing a demolition guy, regular customer of Matt’s, a big round man who bought a dozen eggs every other morning. Every day Matt expected to learn the demo guy’s heart had burst. Maybe he didn’t eat all the eggs himself.

Rafferty burned out around four in the afternoon beside a bratwurst stand—sat down on a dirty bench and leaned over his knees, head bobbing. Carriage wheels rattled over uneven cobblestones. Matt set a hand on Rafferty’s back, but the man didn’t react. Matt didn’t worry. Rafferty’s flare-ups came and went like heavy traffic down a poorly paved street, leaving torn ground and deep holes behind.

After a while Rafferty looked up, staring through his stringy hair. “You’re still here.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t do this, Corbin.”

“I have to show them.”

“Ellen didn’t sound happy about it. She sounded scared.”

Rafferty’s head jerked around. All weakness left him. He looked like he did before he threw a punch. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing. Come on, Corbin. Let’s get you home.”

He half-carried Rafferty to his street, in spite of the stares of stroller-pushing moms and dads, and jeering kids on stoops who should have been in school. The man insisted on walking the last half block to his building and letting himself inside. Matt watched, then went home himself, found Donna working over a ledger she’d brought from the office. The kids were still at school. He hugged her from behind and thought about Rafferty’s wife and the ruin the man had made of himself in the three years since her loss.

“You smell of beer,” Donna said, but she kissed him back anyway, then shoved him off. “Shower. Sleep.”

He lost the rest of the day to fitful dreams of stone teeth and nails, and the tension in the Rafferty girls, like they were still pools about to freeze. He tried to open his mouth, but he had no mouth. He woke at sunset, scoured sober, with a bad taste on his tongue like a small furry thing had died there.

When he reached the market, he had to push through a crowd—unfamiliar folks for the most part, strangers called by strangers called by friends—to the clearing at the center, a bare twenty-foot circle around a ghostlight lantern that underlit the crowd’s faces green, made them seem ghoulish. The brownstones around the market square stared down on them all, silhouettes in their windows. Uptown nobs watching the little people’s show. The rent here had been too high for normal folks for years. Maybe these posh types had already sent rats to the Blacksuits—pardon me, there’s a disturbance in the market square, perhaps you could come inquire.